The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the casuality between generation and voting behavior, while focusing on the political psychology of voters articulated in the 17th National Assembly election. More specifically, it explores political psychology...
The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the casuality between generation and voting behavior, while focusing on the political psychology of voters articulated in the 17th National Assembly election. More specifically, it explores political psychology through which the generation has effected the voting behavior. Until now, the regionalism in the Korean context has been considered as fundamental factor as determining the result of congressional election. This thesis examines the effect of generation besides the regionalism. Namely, this thesis focuses not only on the direct effect of generation on the voting behavior, but also on the its indirect effect.
The data employed in this study were collected from post election survey, which was co-conducted by the Korean Central Election Commission and Korean Social Science Data Center toward 1,500 voters after the 17th National Assembly election that was held on the 15th April 2004, Major independent variables employed in this study are socio-economic background variables, such as gender, generation, education, and so on; political psychology attitudes like political efficacy, party identification, and voting issue attitude of president impeachment. The dependent variables are voting participation and party support.
Various advanced statistical methods of analysis are used. Besides the Chi-square test, both path and discriminant analysis are used. Especially, path analysis is a technique that uses both bivariate and multiple liner regression techniques to test the causal relations among the variables specified in the model. Discriminant analysis is used for examining which factors that can influence two groups, namely, voting participation group and voting abstention group.
The major findings of this study is as follows: First, the major hypothesis that the generation variable, like regional variable, had been influential in the Korean election was confirmed. Namely, when we summarized both the direct and indirect effects of the generation, manifest in the decision of supporting parties, such as Hannara party, Uri party, the Democratic Labor party, there was a strong causal relation between the generation and the party support.
Second, political psychology factors had played an intermediate role in influencing party support and voting participation. Especially, it was found that the effect of the political psychology was larger than the direct effect of generation.
Third, the secular evaluation that the 17th National Assembly election was a sort of impeachment election was empirically verified. Especially, the manifest difference among cohort groups with respect to the support of the impeachment was relevant. The generation group that accepted the impeachment supported the Hannara party, whereas the cohort group that denied the impeachment supported the Uri party. These outcomes, with the exception of the Democratic Labor Party(DLP), were well shown up in the sense that the effects, generated by path from generation variable via the impeachment variable to the party support variable, were larger than the direct and other indirect effects of the generation variables.
Forth, It was confirmed that ideological orientation of voters was the strong political base of the DLP. In other words, partisan attitude toward the DLP, retrospective evaluation against the incumbent President, the pro-government or pro-opposition party tendency were not the factors in determining the support of the DLP.
Fifth, the generation effect on the voting participation had been articulated through the political efficacy of voters. The hypothesis that voters who had a strong political efficacy tend to participate in the voting was confirmed. In addition, it was found that there was a strong relation between voting participation and the evaluation of government. However, attitude toward president impeachment that was the most strongest factor in party support was not the significant variable in the voting participation.
In this thesis, a variety of implications that political psychology can have on the voting behavior were discussed intensively. Academic contribution of this thesis despite the internal limitation was to expand the breadth of the study of political behavior by through the in-depth analysis of political psychology and by through the inter- disciplinary linkage between political science and psychology.